34 Comments

Why on earth are their chipsets/CPUs named after Texas small towns? Our corpoate office is in Bulverde, TX and we have a store in Conroe, TX. Whats next? The Huntsville? Austin? Oh I know. The Midland.
- Creathir Reply

Creathir, you know its a code-name that otherwise won't be revealed anywhere but over computer forums, so it doesn't matter.

And I can sort of see that 5x performance/watt increase as valid. Since they are comparing against Northwood for 5x figure, and against Smithfield is like 4-4.5.

Let's look at Pentium M. It already performs more than 30% faster per clock than Pentium 4. Conroe was said to be many that it will be 30% faster than Yonah, and Yonah is advancement per clock over Dothan, current Pentium M.

Since its 65W, against Pentium D's 130W, there is advantage of two already. The 2-2.25 reduces to 50-70% advantage after factoring out Conroe vs. Yonah. Get what I mean?? Reply

...Apple is moving to Intel. I'll be the low-power, high-performance requirements for the Powerbooks is a *HUGE* factor - and this 64-bit laptop version is why Apple is interested. IBM just couldn't deliver on the power/performance ratio on the laptop side... Reply

Power per Watt as we all know is a measurement pertaining to notebooks. Their slides show that desktop purchases will reach zero by the end of the decade (look at the graph and extrapolate 55% to 47% in 1 year) so they are betting on the notebook avenue for future revenue increases. From what I am seeing in this article they are betting VERY heavily on portability. They attribute the Centrino package with quadrupling access points, which in turn increased notebook purchases. I personally think they are nuts. They are giving up on the desktop, basically cedeing this ground to AMD, and moving into a market where they have an advantage. Reply

actually if you watched the presentation, which you can't (live webcast here in the offices).

this is the mobility group, as there focus is on mobility, each group has their own mission/goals, so of course their slides are geared towards that focus.

looking at pictures, with no words is a big difference. if you've watched or been at idf today, you will see how the focus is to make each group (desktop/server/mobile) on basically one architecture, sans itanic.

0 at the end of the decade, i didn't know the graph went that far. there are plenty of desktop products coming, don't make assumptions so soon. Reply

rotf at the -50% at the end of the next decade...
Until the laptops would be just as powerful, just as cheap, just as fast (hard drive speed wise), have dual DVI, accept professional video cards, and even more, be just as big and heavy as desktops to avoid "shoplifting" them from schools, libraries and so on,
there WILL be a market for desktop computers. Reply

In fact, I do like the Mac Mini and the SFF designs and I would welcome a full powered SFF. I won't get a laptop as I still have a place for a desktop with it's larger ergonomic keyboard and dual LCDs. What can I say? I like the promises, but will I be left at the alter? Reply

Shens to no desktop purchases in the next 5 years. I personally plan on having a PC desktop in the next 5 years, and so does most of AT, i'm sure. Schools, businesses, etc., all will have desktops. So yeah.

Anyone reminded of the IDF in 2000, when tejas was supposed to have us to 10GHz by now...Basically, I'll believe it when I see it. Reply

I don't know, I think he whole 'per watt' angle is a good way to go, even on the desktop. A lot of people feel this will usher in an era of stylish, small, and quiet desktop PC's. As long as I can still buld my own, I'm all for it. Now then, on the other hand it's true that just because a chip has superior performance per watt, doesn't mean it has superior performance period. Reply

It's interesting that for desktop CPU's they use "Integer" performance, while for servers they use "Relative TPC-C", i.e. a real-world database measurement. This could be nothing, but given that in the past the trend has been to push "media" performance, which generally means floating-point SIMD stuff, it's maybe a significant change. By which I mean: I would guess that this means 5x performance increase per watt doing some rather special, probably very heavy SIMD, integer work.

As someone else said, it's odd that they are moving to "per watt" on desktop: it makes sense for laptops, and maybe for servers (heat and power are important) but on the desktop? It almost smacks of a new marketting angle: the new chips won't actually be measurably quicker than current ones, but will use a significant amount less power. Maybe good for business users, but not so great for the Anandtech market! Reply

Does anyone else find this marketing direction(atleast for desktops and servers, it makes sense for laptops) is really stupid?

Also i cant trust any diagram that depicts the Prescott as providing more performance per watt than the Northwood because anyone who knows anything about the Prescotts abnormal power requirements knows thats blatantly not true and also makes me highly skeptical about that 5x performance per watt number that Intel is giving Reply

It doesn't matter. Intel can tell the true believers that it will be 5x as powerful and they'll believe it and buy it before bothering to verify the claims. Then if Intel doesn't live up to the promise, the fanbase will come up with excuses as to why that's no big deal. Me, I'd rather see real numbers from any CPU from Intel or AMD first, but you can already find folks swearing on their family's lives what the new Intel chips will be able to do, what the new ATI gpu will do, etc. It's a sickness, really.

Yes, lower power is better overall, but it's not the Alpha and Omega of processor value to me, especially in my hobbyist desktop. It just can't be "too hot" or draw "too much power." Hope Intel doesn't lose sight of this, although figuring out where to draw that line can be quite hard to do. Reply

It occurred to me that they may be trying to capitalize on the U.S. fuel pseudocrisis. People will probably buy anything right now if you just tell them it's more efficient. Although, if you do the math (1.0 billion divided by 0.1 billion), Intel is only claiming to save people $10 per PC per year. Reply

Ok the word is not to build 32 bit apps anymore. Who, aside from the stupid or desperate is going to buy Yonah when 4 months later you'd be able to get a 64 bit improved Merom? Can you just upgrade and drop a Merom into an appropriately prepared Yonah laptop? I doubt it, or they'd have been singing that song at the IDF.

Yonah is just late. If it had been here Sep'ish and there was still 6-9mo till a 64bit version, it would have made some sense. If the Napa chipset had been built to accomodate both Yonah and an upgrade to Merom, it would have made sense.

Intel is either lying about the real schedules involved here, or they are desperately throwing out chip designs as fast as possible with little idea of planning.

And most people are using (and will be using for a long time) 32-bit applications. Microsoft Office, IE, Outlook, FireFox, iTunes, etc. This is very basic stuff that simply doesn't benefit from 64-bit addressing. Windows XP x64 edition consequently offers no benefits to most users (Tomshardware just did a x64 edition test, their conclusion is that it is useless, PC World concluded the same).

For the vast majority of consumers, Yonah will be just fine. Most people will never know the difference. Reply

In a try by Microsoft to find reasons to force the upgrade of operating systems, taking another slide of the people's money.
Too bad ( :) ) that they have big problems convincing people to upgrade from Office XP (or sometime Office 2000) to their latest greatest Office 2003. Reply

If Conroe uses 65 watts and is about 5x as faster per watt than the current p4 3.8 which uses 135 watts (just over 2x 65) and if Conroe is dual core (another factor of two) then each core should be about 20% faster than a p4 3.8 GHZ to get up to a total of 5x better speed per watt. If this is really true, it is very exciting. Reply

The slide shows the handtop as 0.5 watts and the subnotebook at 5.0 watts, but your text says the handtop is 5.0 watts and that 0.5 is something else. Interesting article otherwise though, I REALLY look forward to the new generation. Reply